Advanced Recoloring: Using Levels

So this might be more of a tutorial for designers but there might be times as a scrapper where you love an element but want it in a different color and so you can re-color it yourself! Here I have a gorgeous red ribbon (from Dream Big Designs- love her CU ribbons!). You can see though that the background is the color I want it. The tone of the colors look about right but the tint is wrong.


No amount of sliding the hue/saturation sliders are really going to keep the quality of the ribbon. You could always desaturate the ribbon and use overlays to make it the right color but I found this other method that's quicker!

Go to Image---> Adjustments-----> Levels



This window will show up with hills. Move the middle slider (gray) to the left and right and notice how it affects the ribbon. Moving to the left makes it lighter while to the right makes it brighter. This is MUCH better than trying to use the brightness/contrast menu as that decreases the quality of the element.



With just a few slides to the left, I have a ribbon extremely close to my color choice. If it's not the same hue, just save what you did with the levels by clicking OK and open up the hue/saturation menu again and change it to where it needs to be.

Next week I will talk about levels with paper textures!